Green Bay Packers

Distance only makes devotion to team stronger

Writing from Beirut, Lebanon, Shadid is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a former staffer of the Daily Cardinal student newspaper there. He is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and is the paper's Beirut bureau chief. He previously worked for the Washington Post from 2003 to 2009 covering Islamic affairs while based in the Middle East. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting, the latest coming last year. He also has written two award-winning books, "Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam," published in 2002, and "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War," published in 2005.

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I realized it had become a problem in Baghdad. 2003 wasn't even that great of a season, at least early on. (The glories of Brett Favre on Monday night in Oakland and Al Harris' pick in overtime in the playoffs against Seattle awaited, as did the post-traumatic stress I still bear from fourth-and-26 in Philadelphia.)

For a fan, though, loyalty is never about wins and losses. It's about being there, and from thousands of miles away I managed to be, by way of a breathtakingly expensive satellite phone that brought me the radio broadcast.

"You're not going to believe the phone bill," my bureau chief, as alarmed as he was unknowing, declared to me right around the time the Packers had a 4-4 record.

I looked at him, shaking my head in insincere sympathy.

"Can they tell which computer ran up the bill?" I asked.

They couldn't.

My love of the Green Bay Packers started when I was a young reporter at the Associated Press in Milwaukee. As a boy, I had been a Dallas Cowboys fan but never really watched football after that. I went to all of one game at Camp Randall as a student at the University of Wisconsin. But on those long weekend shifts, Sundays interminable, I couldn't help but at least keep an eye on Packers games.

On the third week of the 1992 season, I was hooked - by a head-shaking final score of 24-23. When I've had enough of the mayhem on a bad day in Baghdad, I'll occasionally turn to You Tube and replay Favre's touchdown pass to Kitrick Taylor with 13 seconds left that won the game. (The other clip with which I drive my wife crazy is Lombardi shouting, "What the hell's going on out there?")

It went downhill from 1992.

As an editor on the AP's International Desk in New York, I wagered my rent a few too many times on the Packers. I ended up losing an especially tidy sum on the playoff game against the Detroit Lions. No matter. The Packers still won, 16-12.

In 1995, I was sent to Cairo as a foreign correspondent. The only satellite phones then were the size of steamer trunks, and I couldn't manage to take that home with me. So any time the Packers played a night game - those games, for some reason, broadcast on expensive satellite channels available in five-star hotels in the Middle East - I plopped down a few hundred dollars for a room at the Marriott. It was still too little Packers for me.

I suffered in anguish during the 1996 season, missing out on what I thought was history, when the Lombardi Trophy came home. My cousin finally managed to mail a tape of the Super Bowl, and it arrived just before a dinner party. I made it through an excruciating 45 minutes of the meal before surrendering to my passions. By midnight, I had watched the game twice.

I've worked as a foreign correspondent for 15 years, and I feel like the Packers were there on every assignment, from Cairo to Islamabad. On my way back from Egypt, after landing at JFK in New York, I listened in disbelief to the radio in the taxi as Terrell Owens snagged the game-winning pass with three seconds left. Three. In a brutal winter in Kabul, I logged on to the slowest Internet connection in the history of the Afghan capital to see that we had lost to the St. Louis Rams, 45-17. Next to a wood-burning stove, still in my sleeping bag, I asked myself whether Favre really could have thrown six picks. Six.

Budgetary constraints aside, I listened to every game in Baghdad. When I won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, my editor at the Post, Phil Bennett, gave me front-row tickets to a game with the Washington Redskins. Forget the Pulitzer! I'm going to the game! I could have written another book if I had somehow managed not to spend countless hours reading about the Packers online. My wife, Nada, born abroad and having never heard the word touchdown, much less Packers, can now recite the starting lineup. (Well, part of it.)

In December, in my very own pilgrimage, I dragged her, my 9-year-old daughter Laila and my 8-month-old son Malik to the terra sancta of Lambeau Field for the game with the San Francisco 49ers. Nada and Malik made it all of 30 minutes. Laila weathered the first half. I then sat by myself, basking in frigid temperatures, gazing at the occasional flurry and sipping the tastiest beer ever, as time seemed to slow, just a little.

It's not so hard to watch the game these days abroad, as long as you set your alarm for the occasional 3 a.m. You can actually stream them on the Internet from anywhere in the world. I even have a satellite dish that offers ESPN and Fox Sports. But I guess I feel a little less worthy as a fan. Without all the effort, losses don't hurt as much. Wins are not as jubilant. It all feels a little more ordinary.